To the readers: which slow boring post has most impacted how you understand the world? Has it led into action?
For me it was the bus post. I used the information Matt suggested to advocate for better bus service in Santa Cruz and they are taking it up! They re going to implement fewer lines run at least 1x/15 minutes to where I want to go!!!
I bring up facts from this post constantly when talking politics with friends and family. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-something?r=76xgn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web The fact that the median voter lives in the suburbs of a city *smaller* than Rochester, NY is the kind of thing that really hits hard for people who have spent there whole life exclusively living in or near Superstar costal mega cities. It really helps ground ppl to think in a more sophisticated manner about who voters are and what would appeal to them.
Ditto. Sort of the same vein but my wife have both worked on campaigns and one thing I tell people all the time is the number one thing news leaves out of all political analysis that describes so much of what happens politically is people over 65 vote way more than people under 55. And the gap is much larger in non presidential elections. It’s a huge reason NIMBY has so much local power and huge reason reactionary politics generally seems so strong.
Perhaps it’s recency bias, but the post-Oct. 7 column that described the conflict by framing it around the right of return helped me see the larger picture in a way I hadn’t before. I appreciated that.
There are several great examples of how taxation can structure incentives within society in a beneficial way. In particular, I was convinced of the value of targeting consumption rather than wealth or income. The description of Robert Frank's simple yet brilliant method of taxing consumption blew my mind.
This incredibly strong start, which in hindsight exemplifies the best parts of SB - identifying concrete factors and thinking about the incentives faced by individual people https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-wrong-with-the-media
Matt’s post “Why most gun arrests in DC don’t lead to charges.” I send it around constantly, and it’s played a role in the public safety advocacy work I do in DC.
I think the introduction of the phrase "Slow Boring" and the context behind it has been helpful. I feel people are often pulled in two directions in politics.
One is cynicism, and I think Jon Stewart and Colbert's approach for so many years fed into this - and the idea is politics is corrupt, the system is broken, and there's little point in engaging with it.
The other is the dramatized version - where you get really fired up and expect drastic, radical change. Bernie and Obama got young people excited about politics in different ways.
But I don't think either approach is sustainable or realistic. And I think the SB phrase is a better way to think about political change and how we should each approach it.
I would love to hear more about what you did to achieve this! My town has dreadful bus service spread throughout the county but is so unreliable that I can't ever use it.
Its extremely unlikely. But exercising our imagination, let's say that someone in the Trump administration really decided to stick it to Coastal NIMBYs like they did to blue state wealthy people on the SALT cap and offered Matt a position in HUD to formulate a housing plan - would he take it?
I assume no, and not just because of Trump, but for a variety of other reasons as well. But I'm curious if there is something that if offered, he would take.
In MOST cases i'm of the mind that, politics being the slow boring of hard boards and all that, it's best to take the job in the opposition administration and try to make a difference.
In the specific case of Trump, it seems so dysfunctional, corrupt, and prone to disaster that my instinct would be to just stay away. But it's not a very strongly held position and I'd be open to hearing the arguments for trying to make change from within.
Matt has mentioned before that he's not temperamentally suited to government so I don't know that he would go for it even in the Biden administration. That being said, I'm curious if there was something that would draw him into government. (nomination for SCOTUS ?!?)
Purity test standard will be so high are there any sectors were non MAGAs will have any chance? Defense is the only one that has any chance I can think of.
And the NRO crowd ate it up! Apparently, “she’s only a gold-bug inflation-hawk under Democratic administrations,” was considered a good enough defense.
I think the “we need to crowd out the goons” argument will only be stronger.
Unfortunately, I think they’ll be walking into a trap and will mostly be neutered and/or forced to conform. A few lucky conscientious objectors might ultimately be able to help us defeat a full blown fascist dictatorship, but only at great cost.
If Trump’s elected, the military is the last resort.
Tabulation methods matter. A single-vote poll will elide a lot of important preference information, whereas a “pick 3” will give us each individual’s top 3.
I’m a fan of the yimby movement in general, and I’m glad that it seems to be having some successes here in California, but I worry that even though we are getting a lot of new laws passed they might not actually be having any significant effect. What should I be paying attention to, in order to see if yimbyism is winning? The rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in San Francisco?
I think you could see change faster if development rule changes created more leverage for improvement of home building technologies. There is innovation in home building that could move the needle.
There must be *some* way to see that we are going in the right direction, as opposed to the wrong direction. Otherwise how do we ever know anything. Maybe looking at "rent" is too slow of a metric, and I should look at something like "housing starts"?
I mean, yes. Sorry, I was a bit vague, because I was thinking in the long term.
The thing is, the problem is so deep that even as housing starts accelerate, we won’t see rents decelerate at any kind of rate that blatantly confirms the overall YIMBY hypothesis.
We’ve already seen rents KIND OF halt in places like Minneapolis, and econ research confirmed that rent increases slow in gentrifying areas (which are pretty much the only places building rapidly right now).
So, all of that is undeniably good, if early and thus somewhat shaky, evidence. It’s a start!
But from a more holistic perspective like Strong Towns, it’s also woefully inadequate. There remain deep problems with the current fashion of 5-over-1 buildings (which make up most of the recent growth), the lingering unsustainability of parking minimums and stroads, etc.
And it would be good to course-correct before we wake up in 20 years stuck with a bunch of decaying “yuppie fishtanks” (the aforementioned 5-over-1’s) that are sucking just as much capital out of our towns and cities as big box stores currently do.
One needs to be careful about judging success by price measures, because we do not have any price measures. They will all be average unit value measures and that means composition will affect them. IF SF allowed a bund of new high priced apartments that would look like "Rents going up; YIMBY fails, I told you so"
The issue is California is basically the worst case scenario. It's like asking if this cancer cure is working based on somebody with state 4 brain cancer who just got it diagnosed for the first time. OTOH, there are YIMBY success stories like Auckland, and honestly, here in Seattle, things aren't perfect by any means, but despite being a blue-state tech hub, rents have not gone bugf*ck crazy like San Francisco and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Bay Area.
My husband and I have been looking at moving to Boston, and rent being $1000 more for similar units is a bit reason that's not a done deal yet. Seattle is expensive but somehow it's managed enough to not be insane like I'm afraid it will be
A bigger issue is that moderate YIMBY success are unlikely to have local impact. It's only going to reduce prices when it affects the national supply of houses.
Suppose you convince SF to permit 15% more residences to be built over the next 5 years. You might think that SF housing prices would drop substantially but instead once they drop a bit more people from the rest of the country will choose to move to SF and keep those prices high.
Yes, if SF builds a ton of new housing they might temporarily substantially reduce prices in the area because there outbuild the number of people whoget job offers there but that would require a truly massive amount of building and even then might not keep prices down for long.
That's the big problem. Building locally mostly benefits people who may move to your city and it's the national housing supply that really matters.
Yes, I should have stated it better. The national supply of houses in areas people want to live.
I agree there are houses places people don't want to live. My point is just that if only one place people want to live builds it won't see much price drop because it will just draw a greater share of the people who would have gone to one of those other cities.
This misconception constantly comes up in YIMBYism discussions. Manhattan and San Francisco will likely never look "cheap" in the eyes of most people, even under the most Yglesian of YIMBY policies. But if is housing is merely cheapER (relative to what it would be absent housing abundance) that's a positive. Because in such a universe, A) utility is increased (more people who would like to do so can live in such areas AND the people who do live there are likely in better financial shape than otherwise) and B) our economy is strengthened because our most productive places can house a higher portion of our workforce.
YIMBYism can do a lot of good. But what it can't provide is a guarantee that rents will decline in absolute terms.
A quantity measure: difference in difference regression of new units or square feet, possibly in different rental price ranges. I would not leave out new commercial construction, too. That is also constrained by land use and building code restrictions.
Fani Willis, man, I just . . . why? There were at least 3 separate points in that journey where a college freshman would’ve thought “maybe that’s not a good idea if I’m taking the president to court.”
Anyway, the real question: what do you think Judge McAfee is going to do here? What would you do if you were Judge McAfee?
I am wondering if the increasingly-implausible defenses of Willis eventually result in an intellectual implosion amid the strident team-first left and reset along the lines of "actually this conduct is not okay".
I hate to break the news to you, but the "strident team-first left" tend to be the same Zoomer staffers who stanned How To Get Away With Murder and see the Annalise Keating character as a positionally correct antiheroine, not a deeply unethical lawyer whose favorite employee is a former hitman.
I haven't met a single person who understands or even cares about that case. It was never going to trial before the election, and for the most part overlaps with Smith's DC federal case anyway.
I earnestly hope you're right! I worry that "look at this jerk prosecutor who did X/Y/Z wrong" will be deployed to great effect (because it's not incorrect).
Well, I don't mind seeing a greater depth of treatment for a more limited selection of reader questions, but I'm at a loss as to how that's going to "get more substantive submissions and fewer jokes and questions asked in bad faith" in the first place as Dr. Y (suspected Spiky) just graphically demonstrated in the very first comment here. (I also remain puzzled as to Matt's perception of the mailbag -- I think very few questions asked in any given week are "jokes" or "asked in bad faith" -- but it's not my Substack!)
I personally enjoy jokes, and would encourage everyone to keep making them if they are funny. I don't see how it puts anyone out.
I guess the main thing I'm saddened by is that sometimes short answers prompted by simple questions can still be interesting and enlightening, and we're not going to get any of those anymore. For instance, the question below about "how do we know if YIMBYism is winning?" is a good question, but not one that lends itself to a long-form answer.
Yeah. I thought very very few mailbag questions were in bad faith. This kind of Uber-sensitivity is not the kind of fair we’re used to from Matt. In fact it’s his heterodoxy and willingness to engage with a broad range of views not highly curated ones only confirming to popular opinion, that drew many of us here in the first place.
I just want to clarify my meaning here a little bit since I think I maybe came across as too touchy.
Anyone who's ever moderated panels (which I have known a lot of) dreads the guy who raises his hand and then makes a comment rather than asking a question. A close cousin of that guy is a guy who in effect just makes a comment and then concludes with something like "don't you agree?" This isn't like harassing behavior or anything egregious or upsetting to me. I just want to clarify for folks who would like to see their questions asked that to me the point of the exercise is to get real questions grounded in curiosity.
Well frankly, my sense is that the great majority of questions are great insightful ones. That you in the current format you were spoilt for choice of good ones and couldn’t come close to addressing them all for lack of space. It frankly somewhat surprising for me that you couldn’t simply keep ignoring the bad ones. It’s fine to change format for a whole bunch of reasons, but the stated reason given is frankly surprising and unconvincing. It’s not so much only that it seems to me unnecessarily and unfairly disparaging if your most engaged readers , it that it seems to suggest a shift in mentality of the SB team that’s worrisome. But I’d be very glad to be proven wrong !
P.S.
Or put differently and even more bluntly It looks like lack of energy or patience to be challenged by other people’s ideas, a way to back track away from the whole mailbag format back to writing only long form posts on a topic of your choice. now your long posts on topic of your choice is of course the main reason most of us are here, so it’s not terrible per se. But the stated reasoning for the change seems unconvincing. It seems a bit like you’re tired of mailbag and want to focus on what you created this blog to do, but instead of saying so you want to find a justification and can’t find a good one so you end up disparaging your commentators and coming out appearing uncharacteristically sensitive and a bit unfair.
I'm not going to take a position on how many questions fall into this category, but I don't think it's "sensitive" per se to ignore those that are put in bad faith. It's just good culling/triage.
Well, he should definitely ignore them; the question is whether this new format is going to be better, and whether it's a good adaptation to the bad faith questions.
I don't think THPacis is saying Matt was being sensitive to ignore them, but rather that Matt is being sensitive in his reaction to such questions even being asked. (Which I kind of agree with -- even if some questions here were asked in bad faith/as jokes, it's surely not much effort to ignore them. I mean, geez, have you ever seen the stuff that gets directed at Matt on Twitter?)
I always liked to intermix joke questions with more substantive ones week by week. Matt seemed to explicitly frame the mailbag as not only substantive questions when he started this. He even answered one of my joke questions once. I have a list of joke questions still to drop and I'm greatly saddened by this turn of events. :'(
Can you discuss the focus in much of the media on the risk of Biden not moving "left" on the Israel- Hamas war and how that focus ignores the effect a move in that direction would have on Jewish and other voters who will strenuously object to such a move? Seems similar to your point about the benefits to Biden and Harris of tacking to the center.
This one is interesting to me because I listened to Ezra Klein's podcast this today where he said that he thought Biden's approach was no longer defensible, mainly because it is giving Netanyahu too much credit/respect. I know my view is skewed because I live in a heavily Jewish area, but I have heard as many people saying Biden isn't doing enough to support Israel as I have heard people saying he is being too supportive of Israel. It seems like an issue that he just can't win on in the Democratic party.
Klein is a fool. He peaked in his podcasts with Matt because threir personal chemistry got him to help get the best out of Matt. Left to his own devices though, and in a pretty brain dead atmosphere such as NYT, his compete intellectual mediocrity and lack of a shred of original thinking has been revealed for all to see.
That's a little harsh but I agree that Klein's best ideas are ideas he absorbed from Matt and others. Where Klein shines is that he's very good on TV (much much better than Matt is) - unfortunately he doesn't go on TV very much. He ought to be a regular panelist on the Sunday morning shows.
That’s quite harsh. He’s as smart as he needs to be for the audience he’s speaking to. The readership of Slow Boring is skewed vs the average NYT reader
The problem is that the ST support is not being conditioned on getting the "settlers out of the West Bank so an actual negotiation of a 2SS is possible.
It could be less of the case for democrats under 50 and *still* be exactly the correct figures. In the last elections Corbyn still won the youth in Britain while delivering Labour with the worst result since 1935! Labour made the correct choice, both electorally and moraly, in kicking his antisemitic ass out of the party. Dems should learn and hopefully before they make the same mistakes.
Not the conflict itself - but Biden’s choice of who to support and how.
And to be clear, there are lots of regional sectarian conflicts that took US left/right codes - in Nicaragua, for example. Why should this one be any different?
Most American Jews, and indeed most Americans period, think Biden isn’t doing enough for Israel. Currently New York Jews are predicted to break for gop (!). The Dems can of course spit on a key long-standing and loyal part of their coalition in favor of the most fickle parts. They can also break further away from the median voter all in order to appease antisemites. Just don’t pretend it’s smart or admirable politics.
You’d lose a whole lot more than that if Biden is perceived as the puppet of the woke. And in the longer term The Islamist-left alliance is folly do the first order. These people are to the right of gop on every value.
PS
The democratic coalition is supposed to be a “big tent” yet it is alienating the working class of all colors, Asian Americans Latinos, black men and now also Jews. Basically spitting in the face of all its longest and most important constituencies. And for what ? For whom? Islamists and idiotic 20 year olds who don’t vote anyway? As far as I’m concerned with this strategy I’d have said they deserve to lose , except that we all fall with them due to trump! But it’s so obvious that a massive coalition is up for tthe taking- had the gop the moral fiber and political sense to go with a sane patriotic person rather than the scum that is trump, or had the Dems the sense to kick the woke out of the party rather than keep treating them like a spoiled child, you’d have had the potential for an fdr-sized coalition and political hegemony for a generation. Instead both parties prioritize disgusting fringe elements (albeit to different extents!) leaving mainstream Americans understandably mistrustful and disillusioned, to the benefit of none but america’s adversaries.
This is like the least Matt-Yglesias post ever, bravo. Zero desire to make precise claims, "The Democrats" should do XYZ with no discussion of the actual involved parties, wishcasting that adopting My Policy Positions would reverse 5 decades of polarization and deliver 60 senate seats
MY is actually very optimistic on policy being key to electoral outcomes. It’s yiglesian at least in that sense. And of course I’m not gonna spend hours bringing you all the data. That’s not my job.
Muslims and others who are sympathetic to Gazan civilians are not identical to "Islamists." There is a tiny number of Islamists in the US and a very large number of Muslims, particularly in Michigan. And to this point the latter have been pretty reliable Democratic voters, I believe.
Nobody in the pro Palestinian camp is remotely sympathize to Gazan civilians. Otherwise they’d pressure egypt and Hamas to allow them to leave just like everyone who is pro Ukraine urged allowing their civilians to leave! What they are is anti Jew not pro Palestinian.
As to the political points, Dems are alienating different groups in different ways. The anti Jew stuff is losing ore jews than it is gaining blacks, just like the anti merit stuff is losing more Asians than gaining blacks etc
As to Biden’s actual policy- personally I think it’s good! Biden is a master statesman. He is smart and moderate. He probably single handedly prevented prevented a FAR more devastating all out me war! And I personally have no doubt that trump would have been infitnely worse on this, for Israel for Palestinians and for everyone ! (Btw Israeli public agrees with me and now prefers Biden to trump!)
But that’s not the discussion here. The discussion is political expedience and on that Biden would do well to *sound* more pro Israel even as he keeps his current moderate course rather than increasingly sounding colder towards the Israelis while materially supporting them anyway!
You’ve enhanced my thinking on gun regulation. I still believe that more stringent regulation and enforcement would be better than the current , but my prior stance (guns should just be illegal) has been made more nuanced, in particular by comparison to alcohol.
What is another standard position that center-left Democrats have that you think should be similarly rethought or re-contextualized?
Estate taxes. It doesn't raise a lot of revenue. And 15 OECD nations, including the supposedly most egalitarian ones like Norway, Sweden, and New Zealand, don't have an estate tax.
1. Preventing a rentier class of inherited money is a compelling social goal of taxation. I'm probably center-rightish at this point about how incentivizing entrepreneurs to build wealth in their lifetimes enhances society, i.e. I'm anti-wealth tax and so on. I cannot even begin to imagine what the argument is for letting rich kids inherit money they did nothing to earn. It's like, actively bad for society man. I'm pro-redistribution here. We need less Connor Roys/Paris Hiltons and not more
2. Rich kids are the least politically sympathetic group known to mankind
Re inheritance, perhaps it would make more sense to you if you reframe it as “letting” rich people give money to their children. We “let” (upsetting and laden framing BTW) rich people buy all kinds of nonsense that is less sympathetic than “comfort and leisure for their children”.
Don't get me wrong, I believe this money should eventually be taxed. But I don't believe slapping someone with a 40% wealth tax because someone else died is a good way to do it. My idea is to deem all inherited assets (with some dollar-value exemption) to have a cost-basis of $0. When said assets are eventually sold capital gains taxes will apply to the full sale value. Inherited cash would be taxed as regular income. And raise capital gains tax rates while we're at it.
I haven’t seen the cost-basis-of-$0 approach. This is similar to an estate tax, it’s just the timing of when it is recognized (arguably more rational - the sale causes the tax, rather than the death).
It feels like this would still allow significant wealth to accumulate though, and potentially be borrowed against to fund a lavish lifestyle without ever selling the underlying asset. But I suppose there would need to be income at some point to pay back the loan. Need to think through this more.
Wealth taxes in general aren't very rational, because it is inherently a guessing-game combined with hide-n-seek. Even so are property taxes, although those are defensible because property can't be moved or hidden (See: Donald Trump's recent adverse court judgement).
Maybe just end the carve-out for capgains/dividends/rents/royalties and tax ALL income progressively. We could do it revenue-neutrally and still make it a massive tax cut for 80% of the population...or we could raise a real deficit- and debt-reducing amount of revenue, just from ending that carve-out and ending the step-up in cost-basis.
Do unions get a bad rap because people conflate public and private sector unions? Private sector unions offer necessary and vital protections to workers in a capitalist, profit-maximizing system. Public sector unions are set up to be similarly adversarial but there are no rapacious owners, just us citizens that they are bargaining against. It seems crazy and a recipe to make a lot of people hostile to unions even though they might otherwise be sympathetic.
Again, for all the talk of the evils of teacher unions, most of the best public schools in the country have strong teacher unions, while it's not like the schools where teacher unions are weakest are some flowering of alternative teaching.
>it's not like the schools where teacher unions are weakest are some flowering of alternative teaching
Wait- yes they are lol. Some of the best schools overall in the country are private? I.e. elites send their kids to Phillip Exeter Academy, the Dalton School, etc., none of which are unionized to my knowledge. Not sure about this argument
I really don't know if these situations are the Chicken or the Egg. I know a few Eton College guys and they're insanely impressive (e.g., MI5, Rothchild & Co.). But so are their parents. So while I'm sure the teachers -- who have methods passed down from when Shakespeare was contemporary!! -- are differentiated, my strong sense is those kids were going to excel no matter what.
I was about to write this same thing. [Correction] *Federal* public sector unions can't strike - our political power is questionable (the GOP ignore us, Dems maybe listen to us when convenient - like most liberal interest groups?).
But yeah, I think public sector unions can be most useful in protecting employees from harassment, abuse, and other bad management practices.
Sorry - should have clarified I was talking about federal public sector unions. Not legally allowed to strike.
I would guess that Janus v. AFSCME decided by SCOTUS in 2018 has been weakening state/local public sector unions - IIRC, it limits their ability to collect fees from non-members.
As my handle may imply, I’m more interested than most in the plight of one of the most notoriously benighted American states. Mississippi is a laggard relative to not only the rest of the country, but also other Southern states that have similar political and cultural orientations. What do you see as the reasons for this? What are some particular economic-development or educational policies a state in Mississippi’s position should pursue?
I grew up in Louisiana, and we had a saying: "Thank God for Mississippi!" The subtext was that we would have been last in every metric except for Mississippi. My understanding is largely economic. Mississippi has no significant industry (like Birmingham in Alabama), no port like New Orleans, and no real cultural cachet like Florida or Louisiana. It does have a rich musical history. It also has no history of cross-racial solidarity and zero-sum politics. So overall, it's very difficult for it to do well.
I believe Mississippi was one of the richest back in the antebellum cotton days. Moreso even than LA or AL, e.g. I believe part of the answer is that cotton destroys the agricultural productivity of the soil and that effect persists to this day.
Sure. This is just _part_ of the answer, and certainly well less than half. But agricultural productivity is strongly correlated with wealth worldwide. Certainly, Mississippi can import food, but I suspect this is still relevant. If you don't have productive agriculture, and you don't have industry to speak of, and you don't have flowering cities with knowledge / creative industry, and you don't have major transportation hubs, you really don't have much.
I think it has stopped pushing leftward but it's still very much a thing. A lot of institutions were probably breathing a sigh of relief after SCOTUS because it provides a defense from the left. My institution changed our stuff to a more muted "workplace culture" training.* I just think of it like any other new government regulation changing an industry.
*Which we still hate because all mandatory trainings are painful.
It feels like meat prices have been going up a lot, especially beef. At my local market in PDX, boneless skinless chicken thighs were selling for $7/lb, while the bone-in skin-on equivalent was $2/lb. That seems like a huge difference!
To what extent are the rise in meat prices demand vs farm inputs vs labor cost increases? And if the latter is a large contributor, is that due to a tighter labor market, immigration restrictions, or both?
Back at Thanksgiving, Matt, you wrote, "17 points to raise with center-right relatives," offering readers suggestions for persuading the persuadable. What I could really use help with is persuading hard left friends and relatives that their newfangled ideas (e.g. "anti-racism" and "the more genders the merrier") AND their ways of discussing them (and offering contempt for those who disagree) are actually hurting their causes. Assuming you at least somewhat agree, how do you make the case in a bubble that looks at you like "Who let that MAGA in here?" when you try to make a case for moderation?
The IRA seems to be struggling to have the effects that experts predicted based on a bunch of computer models. This seems reminiscent of the way that the ACA failed to change the healthcare system in the way that experts predicted based on their models. Is there a way to make policy that's more robust to failures of prediction, or is this just the best we can do in an uncertain world?
I mean it’s Noah Smith’s “checkism” right? Just passing bills with funding doesn’t make [solar panels, housing, healthcare services, etc.] appear. You need state capacity and local government buy-in.
See also too "why don't we just make more artillery shells for Ukraine?". Think about the dimensions and precisions of a boring old 155mm shell and then get back to me.
I continue to say this is a prioritization issue. If the US had been in an active conflict for 6 months using 155mm shells, we would be producing WAY more than we are right now because we would have prioritized them. But 2+ years into this conflict, we're still not producing anything close to what is required because we haven't prioritized it.
*also, at this point we might have been producing them, but given Republican intransigence on the issue, we might be withholding them.
The delightful little 7x14 minilathe in my garage (made in the People's Republic) could theoretically turn many artillery shell pieces. I don't claim that we have scaled up our production in a maximum effort, total war kind of scenario, but I think most people don't appreciate just how non-trivial it is to manufacture some of this stuff.
Yes and no. The same general sclerosis that makes it hard to build almost anything in the US is readily apparent here. Its not like we're talking about doing it in 6 months. We're talking about over 2 years. And while the US has increased production some, its broader plans for expansion are stuck in the back and forth in Congress.
That is entirely doable. We already do it. And we have already increased production, by about two-fold I believe. You wouldn't literally be able to do it overnight, but Russia blew up Pearl Harbor, we would ramp up ammo production plenty fast.
Frame check: Did the ACA fail? The uninsured rate was cut in half and the healthcare inflation curve slowed / was bent. I don't know about the IRA, but I also suspect it may be a little too soon call it a failure.
I am sympathetic to your critique of modern climate activist groups, so I'm not asking this to be troll-y. But how would you distinguish today's climate activists from aggressive civil rights activism (e.g., Freedom Riders, MLK-led protests) or even early abolitionists given that they were all relatively unpopular and politically harmful positions in their day?
How can the planet Arrakis simultaneously be one of the single most important planets in the Imperium yet still function as a frontier colony with weak Imperial control?
Minor Houses have the appearance of status and authority on Arrakis; but when it comes to real tests of #StateCapacity, they are often constrained by the petty squabbles and localized knowledge of water-peddler merchants like Lingar Bewt, smugglers like Esmar Tuek, Guild bank representatives, and the Fremen.
To the readers: which slow boring post has most impacted how you understand the world? Has it led into action?
For me it was the bus post. I used the information Matt suggested to advocate for better bus service in Santa Cruz and they are taking it up! They re going to implement fewer lines run at least 1x/15 minutes to where I want to go!!!
I bring up facts from this post constantly when talking politics with friends and family. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-something?r=76xgn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web The fact that the median voter lives in the suburbs of a city *smaller* than Rochester, NY is the kind of thing that really hits hard for people who have spent there whole life exclusively living in or near Superstar costal mega cities. It really helps ground ppl to think in a more sophisticated manner about who voters are and what would appeal to them.
Ditto. Sort of the same vein but my wife have both worked on campaigns and one thing I tell people all the time is the number one thing news leaves out of all political analysis that describes so much of what happens politically is people over 65 vote way more than people under 55. And the gap is much larger in non presidential elections. It’s a huge reason NIMBY has so much local power and huge reason reactionary politics generally seems so strong.
Perhaps it’s recency bias, but the post-Oct. 7 column that described the conflict by framing it around the right of return helped me see the larger picture in a way I hadn’t before. I appreciated that.
"A totally off-the-news post about taxes"
https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-totally-off-the-news-post-about
There are several great examples of how taxation can structure incentives within society in a beneficial way. In particular, I was convinced of the value of targeting consumption rather than wealth or income. The description of Robert Frank's simple yet brilliant method of taxing consumption blew my mind.
This incredibly strong start, which in hindsight exemplifies the best parts of SB - identifying concrete factors and thinking about the incentives faced by individual people https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-wrong-with-the-media
Matt’s post “Why most gun arrests in DC don’t lead to charges.” I send it around constantly, and it’s played a role in the public safety advocacy work I do in DC.
I think the introduction of the phrase "Slow Boring" and the context behind it has been helpful. I feel people are often pulled in two directions in politics.
One is cynicism, and I think Jon Stewart and Colbert's approach for so many years fed into this - and the idea is politics is corrupt, the system is broken, and there's little point in engaging with it.
The other is the dramatized version - where you get really fired up and expect drastic, radical change. Bernie and Obama got young people excited about politics in different ways.
But I don't think either approach is sustainable or realistic. And I think the SB phrase is a better way to think about political change and how we should each approach it.
I would love to hear more about what you did to achieve this! My town has dreadful bus service spread throughout the county but is so unreliable that I can't ever use it.
As a part time resident of Santa Cruz, thank you!
If he's elected, what's the case for working in the Trump administration vs. not? Is it different from eight years ago?
I'd be interested in hearing under what if any circumstances Matt would consider working in the Trump administration?
i’d like to know under which circumstances Matt would be *offered* such a position.
Its extremely unlikely. But exercising our imagination, let's say that someone in the Trump administration really decided to stick it to Coastal NIMBYs like they did to blue state wealthy people on the SALT cap and offered Matt a position in HUD to formulate a housing plan - would he take it?
I assume no, and not just because of Trump, but for a variety of other reasons as well. But I'm curious if there is something that if offered, he would take.
In MOST cases i'm of the mind that, politics being the slow boring of hard boards and all that, it's best to take the job in the opposition administration and try to make a difference.
In the specific case of Trump, it seems so dysfunctional, corrupt, and prone to disaster that my instinct would be to just stay away. But it's not a very strongly held position and I'd be open to hearing the arguments for trying to make change from within.
Matt has mentioned before that he's not temperamentally suited to government so I don't know that he would go for it even in the Biden administration. That being said, I'm curious if there was something that would draw him into government. (nomination for SCOTUS ?!?)
Purity test standard will be so high are there any sectors were non MAGAs will have any chance? Defense is the only one that has any chance I can think of.
Federal Reserve. Trump and GOP still depend on big donors and no way they’ll stomach a crank or Trump loyalist over an actual qualified candidate.
He almost got a Trump loyalist appointed on the Fed! It was very, very close
And the NRO crowd ate it up! Apparently, “she’s only a gold-bug inflation-hawk under Democratic administrations,” was considered a good enough defense.
I think the “we need to crowd out the goons” argument will only be stronger.
Unfortunately, I think they’ll be walking into a trap and will mostly be neutered and/or forced to conform. A few lucky conscientious objectors might ultimately be able to help us defeat a full blown fascist dictatorship, but only at great cost.
If Trump’s elected, the military is the last resort.
What will be the voting method for the new Monday election?
RCV? STAR? Approval?
Matt needs to put his money where his mouth is.
Poll!
You must be new here.
Tabulation methods matter. A single-vote poll will elide a lot of important preference information, whereas a “pick 3” will give us each individual’s top 3.
Also, Matt brings in enough money, he ought to have decent enough pull to get Substack to create his preferred tabulation system!
Substack’s like button only supports approval voting, so that’s my guess (and my favorite)
Approval makes a lot of sense for this, actually.
And for everything else!
It has my approval.
I’m a fan of the yimby movement in general, and I’m glad that it seems to be having some successes here in California, but I worry that even though we are getting a lot of new laws passed they might not actually be having any significant effect. What should I be paying attention to, in order to see if yimbyism is winning? The rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in San Francisco?
The biggest problem is that development takes decades. We’re not going to see any results for a long time.
I think you could see change faster if development rule changes created more leverage for improvement of home building technologies. There is innovation in home building that could move the needle.
There must be *some* way to see that we are going in the right direction, as opposed to the wrong direction. Otherwise how do we ever know anything. Maybe looking at "rent" is too slow of a metric, and I should look at something like "housing starts"?
I mean, yes. Sorry, I was a bit vague, because I was thinking in the long term.
The thing is, the problem is so deep that even as housing starts accelerate, we won’t see rents decelerate at any kind of rate that blatantly confirms the overall YIMBY hypothesis.
We’ve already seen rents KIND OF halt in places like Minneapolis, and econ research confirmed that rent increases slow in gentrifying areas (which are pretty much the only places building rapidly right now).
So, all of that is undeniably good, if early and thus somewhat shaky, evidence. It’s a start!
But from a more holistic perspective like Strong Towns, it’s also woefully inadequate. There remain deep problems with the current fashion of 5-over-1 buildings (which make up most of the recent growth), the lingering unsustainability of parking minimums and stroads, etc.
And it would be good to course-correct before we wake up in 20 years stuck with a bunch of decaying “yuppie fishtanks” (the aforementioned 5-over-1’s) that are sucking just as much capital out of our towns and cities as big box stores currently do.
One needs to be careful about judging success by price measures, because we do not have any price measures. They will all be average unit value measures and that means composition will affect them. IF SF allowed a bund of new high priced apartments that would look like "Rents going up; YIMBY fails, I told you so"
The issue is California is basically the worst case scenario. It's like asking if this cancer cure is working based on somebody with state 4 brain cancer who just got it diagnosed for the first time. OTOH, there are YIMBY success stories like Auckland, and honestly, here in Seattle, things aren't perfect by any means, but despite being a blue-state tech hub, rents have not gone bugf*ck crazy like San Francisco and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Bay Area.
My husband and I have been looking at moving to Boston, and rent being $1000 more for similar units is a bit reason that's not a done deal yet. Seattle is expensive but somehow it's managed enough to not be insane like I'm afraid it will be
Reform in Arlington VA (new Amazon HQ) may be affecting Seattle.
A bigger issue is that moderate YIMBY success are unlikely to have local impact. It's only going to reduce prices when it affects the national supply of houses.
Suppose you convince SF to permit 15% more residences to be built over the next 5 years. You might think that SF housing prices would drop substantially but instead once they drop a bit more people from the rest of the country will choose to move to SF and keep those prices high.
Yes, if SF builds a ton of new housing they might temporarily substantially reduce prices in the area because there outbuild the number of people whoget job offers there but that would require a truly massive amount of building and even then might not keep prices down for long.
That's the big problem. Building locally mostly benefits people who may move to your city and it's the national housing supply that really matters.
Yes. Don't judge success by prices.
Yes, I should have stated it better. The national supply of houses in areas people want to live.
I agree there are houses places people don't want to live. My point is just that if only one place people want to live builds it won't see much price drop because it will just draw a greater share of the people who would have gone to one of those other cities.
I hate to nitpick a comrade here, but comrade, we must stop imagining that rents will *go down*.
The NIMBYs will raise holy hell if that happens, and their even-better-connected landlord counterparts won’t accept it.
The best that happens is that housing inflation stays flat until wages outpace it long enough that it reduces as a share of income.
This misconception constantly comes up in YIMBYism discussions. Manhattan and San Francisco will likely never look "cheap" in the eyes of most people, even under the most Yglesian of YIMBY policies. But if is housing is merely cheapER (relative to what it would be absent housing abundance) that's a positive. Because in such a universe, A) utility is increased (more people who would like to do so can live in such areas AND the people who do live there are likely in better financial shape than otherwise) and B) our economy is strengthened because our most productive places can house a higher portion of our workforce.
YIMBYism can do a lot of good. But what it can't provide is a guarantee that rents will decline in absolute terms.
>What should I be paying attention to, in order to see if yimbyism is winning? <
An increase in California’s rate of population increase.
That will probably be the more reliable indicator than mere spot rents.
A quantity measure: difference in difference regression of new units or square feet, possibly in different rental price ranges. I would not leave out new commercial construction, too. That is also constrained by land use and building code restrictions.
Overall I suspect that a substantial increase in the number of people employeed building housing nationally is what will show YIMBYism is winning.
Fani Willis, man, I just . . . why? There were at least 3 separate points in that journey where a college freshman would’ve thought “maybe that’s not a good idea if I’m taking the president to court.”
Anyway, the real question: what do you think Judge McAfee is going to do here? What would you do if you were Judge McAfee?
Ambition is a helluva drug.
I am wondering if the increasingly-implausible defenses of Willis eventually result in an intellectual implosion amid the strident team-first left and reset along the lines of "actually this conduct is not okay".
I hate to break the news to you, but the "strident team-first left" tend to be the same Zoomer staffers who stanned How To Get Away With Murder and see the Annalise Keating character as a positionally correct antiheroine, not a deeply unethical lawyer whose favorite employee is a former hitman.
I haven't met a single person who understands or even cares about that case. It was never going to trial before the election, and for the most part overlaps with Smith's DC federal case anyway.
I earnestly hope you're right! I worry that "look at this jerk prosecutor who did X/Y/Z wrong" will be deployed to great effect (because it's not incorrect).
Maybe it's different on the ground in GA, which would be concerning because of the whole "georgia is a swing state now" thing.
Well, I don't mind seeing a greater depth of treatment for a more limited selection of reader questions, but I'm at a loss as to how that's going to "get more substantive submissions and fewer jokes and questions asked in bad faith" in the first place as Dr. Y (suspected Spiky) just graphically demonstrated in the very first comment here. (I also remain puzzled as to Matt's perception of the mailbag -- I think very few questions asked in any given week are "jokes" or "asked in bad faith" -- but it's not my Substack!)
Tradle:
#Tradle #721 2/6
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://games.oec.world/en/tradle
I personally enjoy jokes, and would encourage everyone to keep making them if they are funny. I don't see how it puts anyone out.
I guess the main thing I'm saddened by is that sometimes short answers prompted by simple questions can still be interesting and enlightening, and we're not going to get any of those anymore. For instance, the question below about "how do we know if YIMBYism is winning?" is a good question, but not one that lends itself to a long-form answer.
Or like, questions about movies and such that wouldn't necessarily warrant a full post response.
Perhaps he can occasionally save those up and do a movie post discussing a bunch of different questions/items.
I did love the short form stuff. Only post I consistently read all week 😕
If I were to guess, that interesting short-form engagement is more targeted for Xshitter, but I choose to not do business with that organization.
I could totally see Matt expounding at considerable length to answer such a question.
Yeah. I thought very very few mailbag questions were in bad faith. This kind of Uber-sensitivity is not the kind of fair we’re used to from Matt. In fact it’s his heterodoxy and willingness to engage with a broad range of views not highly curated ones only confirming to popular opinion, that drew many of us here in the first place.
I just want to clarify my meaning here a little bit since I think I maybe came across as too touchy.
Anyone who's ever moderated panels (which I have known a lot of) dreads the guy who raises his hand and then makes a comment rather than asking a question. A close cousin of that guy is a guy who in effect just makes a comment and then concludes with something like "don't you agree?" This isn't like harassing behavior or anything egregious or upsetting to me. I just want to clarify for folks who would like to see their questions asked that to me the point of the exercise is to get real questions grounded in curiosity.
Well frankly, my sense is that the great majority of questions are great insightful ones. That you in the current format you were spoilt for choice of good ones and couldn’t come close to addressing them all for lack of space. It frankly somewhat surprising for me that you couldn’t simply keep ignoring the bad ones. It’s fine to change format for a whole bunch of reasons, but the stated reason given is frankly surprising and unconvincing. It’s not so much only that it seems to me unnecessarily and unfairly disparaging if your most engaged readers , it that it seems to suggest a shift in mentality of the SB team that’s worrisome. But I’d be very glad to be proven wrong !
P.S.
Or put differently and even more bluntly It looks like lack of energy or patience to be challenged by other people’s ideas, a way to back track away from the whole mailbag format back to writing only long form posts on a topic of your choice. now your long posts on topic of your choice is of course the main reason most of us are here, so it’s not terrible per se. But the stated reasoning for the change seems unconvincing. It seems a bit like you’re tired of mailbag and want to focus on what you created this blog to do, but instead of saying so you want to find a justification and can’t find a good one so you end up disparaging your commentators and coming out appearing uncharacteristically sensitive and a bit unfair.
lol it’s not that deep man, if anything you are the one coming off as sensitive
I think question of the form, "Why do you disagree with X" where X may need a bit of fleshing out are worthwhile and not necessarily in "bad faith?'
I'm not going to take a position on how many questions fall into this category, but I don't think it's "sensitive" per se to ignore those that are put in bad faith. It's just good culling/triage.
Well, he should definitely ignore them; the question is whether this new format is going to be better, and whether it's a good adaptation to the bad faith questions.
I don't think THPacis is saying Matt was being sensitive to ignore them, but rather that Matt is being sensitive in his reaction to such questions even being asked. (Which I kind of agree with -- even if some questions here were asked in bad faith/as jokes, it's surely not much effort to ignore them. I mean, geez, have you ever seen the stuff that gets directed at Matt on Twitter?)
My hot take is that if a comment made by spiky was a good comment, then it was simply a good comment.
Now, what kind of country has 17% of its exports represented by 💀BLUUUUD💀?
Now I'm wondering what percentage of Haiti's exports were blood when the Duvaliers were in power . . . .
Is it the special crab blood??
I always liked to intermix joke questions with more substantive ones week by week. Matt seemed to explicitly frame the mailbag as not only substantive questions when he started this. He even answered one of my joke questions once. I have a list of joke questions still to drop and I'm greatly saddened by this turn of events. :'(
Can you discuss the focus in much of the media on the risk of Biden not moving "left" on the Israel- Hamas war and how that focus ignores the effect a move in that direction would have on Jewish and other voters who will strenuously object to such a move? Seems similar to your point about the benefits to Biden and Harris of tacking to the center.
This one is interesting to me because I listened to Ezra Klein's podcast this today where he said that he thought Biden's approach was no longer defensible, mainly because it is giving Netanyahu too much credit/respect. I know my view is skewed because I live in a heavily Jewish area, but I have heard as many people saying Biden isn't doing enough to support Israel as I have heard people saying he is being too supportive of Israel. It seems like an issue that he just can't win on in the Democratic party.
In response to your comment, this morning I would have thought that I couldn't give less of a darn about what Ezra Klein thinks. And yet here we are.
Klein is a fool. He peaked in his podcasts with Matt because threir personal chemistry got him to help get the best out of Matt. Left to his own devices though, and in a pretty brain dead atmosphere such as NYT, his compete intellectual mediocrity and lack of a shred of original thinking has been revealed for all to see.
(Yes I’m in a generous mood today lol).
That's a little harsh but I agree that Klein's best ideas are ideas he absorbed from Matt and others. Where Klein shines is that he's very good on TV (much much better than Matt is) - unfortunately he doesn't go on TV very much. He ought to be a regular panelist on the Sunday morning shows.
That’s quite harsh. He’s as smart as he needs to be for the audience he’s speaking to. The readership of Slow Boring is skewed vs the average NYT reader
I admit it’s harsh. But is it wrong ?
The problem is that the ST support is not being conditioned on getting the "settlers out of the West Bank so an actual negotiation of a 2SS is possible.
You just made my case in a much more succinct and effective way. Thanks.
It could be less of the case for democrats under 50 and *still* be exactly the correct figures. In the last elections Corbyn still won the youth in Britain while delivering Labour with the worst result since 1935! Labour made the correct choice, both electorally and moraly, in kicking his antisemitic ass out of the party. Dems should learn and hopefully before they make the same mistakes.
Other than PA, Jewish voters tend not to be concentrated in swing states.
Also most American Jews dislike Netanyahu.
I think Biden actually has little to lose by moving left - instead he just genuinely doesn’t believe doing so is the right response.
I think mapping Bibi-vs-Hamas onto a US left-right axis is a totally unhelpful exercise.
Why? They seem pretty clearly right vs left coded to me. (Also using Hamas as a stand in for “sympathy for the Palestinians” is quite the strawman.)
I'll put the burden of proof on the affirmative side: why would it be useful to code a regional sectarian internal conflict in US left/right terms?
Not the conflict itself - but Biden’s choice of who to support and how.
And to be clear, there are lots of regional sectarian conflicts that took US left/right codes - in Nicaragua, for example. Why should this one be any different?
Whereas using Netanyahu to stand for Israel is ok?
Most American Jews, and indeed most Americans period, think Biden isn’t doing enough for Israel. Currently New York Jews are predicted to break for gop (!). The Dems can of course spit on a key long-standing and loyal part of their coalition in favor of the most fickle parts. They can also break further away from the median voter all in order to appease antisemites. Just don’t pretend it’s smart or admirable politics.
Well, the Democrats aren't going to lose New York but we could lose Michigan.
You’d lose a whole lot more than that if Biden is perceived as the puppet of the woke. And in the longer term The Islamist-left alliance is folly do the first order. These people are to the right of gop on every value.
PS
The democratic coalition is supposed to be a “big tent” yet it is alienating the working class of all colors, Asian Americans Latinos, black men and now also Jews. Basically spitting in the face of all its longest and most important constituencies. And for what ? For whom? Islamists and idiotic 20 year olds who don’t vote anyway? As far as I’m concerned with this strategy I’d have said they deserve to lose , except that we all fall with them due to trump! But it’s so obvious that a massive coalition is up for tthe taking- had the gop the moral fiber and political sense to go with a sane patriotic person rather than the scum that is trump, or had the Dems the sense to kick the woke out of the party rather than keep treating them like a spoiled child, you’d have had the potential for an fdr-sized coalition and political hegemony for a generation. Instead both parties prioritize disgusting fringe elements (albeit to different extents!) leaving mainstream Americans understandably mistrustful and disillusioned, to the benefit of none but america’s adversaries.
This is like the least Matt-Yglesias post ever, bravo. Zero desire to make precise claims, "The Democrats" should do XYZ with no discussion of the actual involved parties, wishcasting that adopting My Policy Positions would reverse 5 decades of polarization and deliver 60 senate seats
MY is actually very optimistic on policy being key to electoral outcomes. It’s yiglesian at least in that sense. And of course I’m not gonna spend hours bringing you all the data. That’s not my job.
I struggle to see how the administration's current stance on Israel/Gaza could be perceived as being a "puppet of the woke," and one sign of that is that the people you're talking about are furious about the administration's current stance on Israel/Gaza. The New York Jews you mention have more hawkish views on Israel than Democratic voters as a whole—in your PS you mention black men and I'm not sure what you're referring to, but Black voters are more sympathetic to Gazans than you are: 1) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/us/african-americans-palestinian.html 2) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/us/politics/black-pastors-biden-gaza-israel.html 3) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/07/opinion/black-jewish-israel-gaza.html
Muslims and others who are sympathetic to Gazan civilians are not identical to "Islamists." There is a tiny number of Islamists in the US and a very large number of Muslims, particularly in Michigan. And to this point the latter have been pretty reliable Democratic voters, I believe.
Nobody in the pro Palestinian camp is remotely sympathize to Gazan civilians. Otherwise they’d pressure egypt and Hamas to allow them to leave just like everyone who is pro Ukraine urged allowing their civilians to leave! What they are is anti Jew not pro Palestinian.
As to the political points, Dems are alienating different groups in different ways. The anti Jew stuff is losing ore jews than it is gaining blacks, just like the anti merit stuff is losing more Asians than gaining blacks etc
As to Biden’s actual policy- personally I think it’s good! Biden is a master statesman. He is smart and moderate. He probably single handedly prevented prevented a FAR more devastating all out me war! And I personally have no doubt that trump would have been infitnely worse on this, for Israel for Palestinians and for everyone ! (Btw Israeli public agrees with me and now prefers Biden to trump!)
But that’s not the discussion here. The discussion is political expedience and on that Biden would do well to *sound* more pro Israel even as he keeps his current moderate course rather than increasingly sounding colder towards the Israelis while materially supporting them anyway!
Also would helpful if the Dems want any of the other suburban NY House seats back...
Good point ! The house is important too (though admittedly not as much as the White House)
I agree with you about Biden's motivation. I am more interested in the failure of the media to even raise my question (or your possible answer).
You’ve enhanced my thinking on gun regulation. I still believe that more stringent regulation and enforcement would be better than the current , but my prior stance (guns should just be illegal) has been made more nuanced, in particular by comparison to alcohol.
What is another standard position that center-left Democrats have that you think should be similarly rethought or re-contextualized?
Estate taxes. It doesn't raise a lot of revenue. And 15 OECD nations, including the supposedly most egalitarian ones like Norway, Sweden, and New Zealand, don't have an estate tax.
1. Preventing a rentier class of inherited money is a compelling social goal of taxation. I'm probably center-rightish at this point about how incentivizing entrepreneurs to build wealth in their lifetimes enhances society, i.e. I'm anti-wealth tax and so on. I cannot even begin to imagine what the argument is for letting rich kids inherit money they did nothing to earn. It's like, actively bad for society man. I'm pro-redistribution here. We need less Connor Roys/Paris Hiltons and not more
2. Rich kids are the least politically sympathetic group known to mankind
Re inheritance, perhaps it would make more sense to you if you reframe it as “letting” rich people give money to their children. We “let” (upsetting and laden framing BTW) rich people buy all kinds of nonsense that is less sympathetic than “comfort and leisure for their children”.
The answer of course is to tax consumption.
Don't get me wrong, I believe this money should eventually be taxed. But I don't believe slapping someone with a 40% wealth tax because someone else died is a good way to do it. My idea is to deem all inherited assets (with some dollar-value exemption) to have a cost-basis of $0. When said assets are eventually sold capital gains taxes will apply to the full sale value. Inherited cash would be taxed as regular income. And raise capital gains tax rates while we're at it.
I haven’t seen the cost-basis-of-$0 approach. This is similar to an estate tax, it’s just the timing of when it is recognized (arguably more rational - the sale causes the tax, rather than the death).
It feels like this would still allow significant wealth to accumulate though, and potentially be borrowed against to fund a lavish lifestyle without ever selling the underlying asset. But I suppose there would need to be income at some point to pay back the loan. Need to think through this more.
Wealth taxes in general aren't very rational, because it is inherently a guessing-game combined with hide-n-seek. Even so are property taxes, although those are defensible because property can't be moved or hidden (See: Donald Trump's recent adverse court judgement).
This is posed as a question for debate, because I don't know enough about the mechanisms and second-order effects to have a useful opinion:
Should borrowing against an asset trigger a cost-basis / capital-gains tax / mark-to-market re-assessment?
In my (naive) opinion it seems like that would curb the borrow-money-but-never-spend-principle tax dodge that wealthy people seem to have found.
Maybe just end the carve-out for capgains/dividends/rents/royalties and tax ALL income progressively. We could do it revenue-neutrally and still make it a massive tax cut for 80% of the population...or we could raise a real deficit- and debt-reducing amount of revenue, just from ending that carve-out and ending the step-up in cost-basis.
Maybe it doesn't raise a lot of revenue but it also affects very small numbers of people.
Why get rid of it? Why not just keep things the way they are?
The majority center-left take I see is the estate tax needs expanded.
These countries don’t even tax legacies as income to the recipient?
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/estate-and-inheritance-taxes-around-world/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20has%20the%20fourth,and%20France%20(45%20percent).
Thanks.
I'll note Sweden is a fair degree poorer than the US and economic inequality there has been rising sharply in recent years:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9989655/#:~:text=Sweden's%20Gini%2Dcoefficient%E2%80%94a%20measure,society%2C%20which%20Sweden%20is%20facing.
Do unions get a bad rap because people conflate public and private sector unions? Private sector unions offer necessary and vital protections to workers in a capitalist, profit-maximizing system. Public sector unions are set up to be similarly adversarial but there are no rapacious owners, just us citizens that they are bargaining against. It seems crazy and a recipe to make a lot of people hostile to unions even though they might otherwise be sympathetic.
Public sectors unions are needed to protect public servants from mediocre managers.
Again, for all the talk of the evils of teacher unions, most of the best public schools in the country have strong teacher unions, while it's not like the schools where teacher unions are weakest are some flowering of alternative teaching.
>it's not like the schools where teacher unions are weakest are some flowering of alternative teaching
Wait- yes they are lol. Some of the best schools overall in the country are private? I.e. elites send their kids to Phillip Exeter Academy, the Dalton School, etc., none of which are unionized to my knowledge. Not sure about this argument
It's actually not clear that these schools have uniquely excellent teaching staff.
I really don't know if these situations are the Chicken or the Egg. I know a few Eton College guys and they're insanely impressive (e.g., MI5, Rothchild & Co.). But so are their parents. So while I'm sure the teachers -- who have methods passed down from when Shakespeare was contemporary!! -- are differentiated, my strong sense is those kids were going to excel no matter what.
https://collections.etoncollege.com/online-exhibition/shakespeare/
I was about to write this same thing. [Correction] *Federal* public sector unions can't strike - our political power is questionable (the GOP ignore us, Dems maybe listen to us when convenient - like most liberal interest groups?).
But yeah, I think public sector unions can be most useful in protecting employees from harassment, abuse, and other bad management practices.
Teachers strike all the time, what are you talking about that public sector unions can't strike?
Sorry - should have clarified I was talking about federal public sector unions. Not legally allowed to strike.
I would guess that Janus v. AFSCME decided by SCOTUS in 2018 has been weakening state/local public sector unions - IIRC, it limits their ability to collect fees from non-members.
As my handle may imply, I’m more interested than most in the plight of one of the most notoriously benighted American states. Mississippi is a laggard relative to not only the rest of the country, but also other Southern states that have similar political and cultural orientations. What do you see as the reasons for this? What are some particular economic-development or educational policies a state in Mississippi’s position should pursue?
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjgwpq_yseEAxWk4ckDHXOcDGcQFnoECB4QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fus-news%2Fthe-american-south-is-booming-why-is-mississippi-left-behind-eff0d986&usg=AOvVaw2H5_3AEkI0q2a2lsk8N8eT&opi=89978449
I don't think I can do this one this week, but I think it's an excellent question and I'm going to try to think about something.
I grew up in Louisiana, and we had a saying: "Thank God for Mississippi!" The subtext was that we would have been last in every metric except for Mississippi. My understanding is largely economic. Mississippi has no significant industry (like Birmingham in Alabama), no port like New Orleans, and no real cultural cachet like Florida or Louisiana. It does have a rich musical history. It also has no history of cross-racial solidarity and zero-sum politics. So overall, it's very difficult for it to do well.
Lol. Many decades back, I lived in Louisiana. I _totally_ get this comment.
Isn't the answer how rural it is? Is Mississippi worse than the rest of the rural South?
Lack of industry and trade is part of it I think.
I believe Mississippi was one of the richest back in the antebellum cotton days. Moreso even than LA or AL, e.g. I believe part of the answer is that cotton destroys the agricultural productivity of the soil and that effect persists to this day.
Maybe, I think the social and economic implications are even more influential.
Sure. This is just _part_ of the answer, and certainly well less than half. But agricultural productivity is strongly correlated with wealth worldwide. Certainly, Mississippi can import food, but I suspect this is still relevant. If you don't have productive agriculture, and you don't have industry to speak of, and you don't have flowering cities with knowledge / creative industry, and you don't have major transportation hubs, you really don't have much.
What is your take on where DEI is now? Has it been significantly weakened or is that just a right-wing echo chamber?
I think it has stopped pushing leftward but it's still very much a thing. A lot of institutions were probably breathing a sigh of relief after SCOTUS because it provides a defense from the left. My institution changed our stuff to a more muted "workplace culture" training.* I just think of it like any other new government regulation changing an industry.
*Which we still hate because all mandatory trainings are painful.
It feels like meat prices have been going up a lot, especially beef. At my local market in PDX, boneless skinless chicken thighs were selling for $7/lb, while the bone-in skin-on equivalent was $2/lb. That seems like a huge difference!
To what extent are the rise in meat prices demand vs farm inputs vs labor cost increases? And if the latter is a large contributor, is that due to a tighter labor market, immigration restrictions, or both?
Back at Thanksgiving, Matt, you wrote, "17 points to raise with center-right relatives," offering readers suggestions for persuading the persuadable. What I could really use help with is persuading hard left friends and relatives that their newfangled ideas (e.g. "anti-racism" and "the more genders the merrier") AND their ways of discussing them (and offering contempt for those who disagree) are actually hurting their causes. Assuming you at least somewhat agree, how do you make the case in a bubble that looks at you like "Who let that MAGA in here?" when you try to make a case for moderation?
The IRA seems to be struggling to have the effects that experts predicted based on a bunch of computer models. This seems reminiscent of the way that the ACA failed to change the healthcare system in the way that experts predicted based on their models. Is there a way to make policy that's more robust to failures of prediction, or is this just the best we can do in an uncertain world?
I mean it’s Noah Smith’s “checkism” right? Just passing bills with funding doesn’t make [solar panels, housing, healthcare services, etc.] appear. You need state capacity and local government buy-in.
And physical capacity as well. If there are only so many CNC milling machines in the country, we can't magically make more appear with a check.
See also too "why don't we just make more artillery shells for Ukraine?". Think about the dimensions and precisions of a boring old 155mm shell and then get back to me.
I continue to say this is a prioritization issue. If the US had been in an active conflict for 6 months using 155mm shells, we would be producing WAY more than we are right now because we would have prioritized them. But 2+ years into this conflict, we're still not producing anything close to what is required because we haven't prioritized it.
*also, at this point we might have been producing them, but given Republican intransigence on the issue, we might be withholding them.
The delightful little 7x14 minilathe in my garage (made in the People's Republic) could theoretically turn many artillery shell pieces. I don't claim that we have scaled up our production in a maximum effort, total war kind of scenario, but I think most people don't appreciate just how non-trivial it is to manufacture some of this stuff.
Yes and no. The same general sclerosis that makes it hard to build almost anything in the US is readily apparent here. Its not like we're talking about doing it in 6 months. We're talking about over 2 years. And while the US has increased production some, its broader plans for expansion are stuck in the back and forth in Congress.
That is entirely doable. We already do it. And we have already increased production, by about two-fold I believe. You wouldn't literally be able to do it overnight, but Russia blew up Pearl Harbor, we would ramp up ammo production plenty fast.
https://radicalcontributions.substack.com/p/elite-underproduction-why-we-cant-solve-hard-problems-anymore
Both of those failures occurred because our country has too many veto points. We can’t get real things done anymore.
Frame check: Did the ACA fail? The uninsured rate was cut in half and the healthcare inflation curve slowed / was bent. I don't know about the IRA, but I also suspect it may be a little too soon call it a failure.
I am sympathetic to your critique of modern climate activist groups, so I'm not asking this to be troll-y. But how would you distinguish today's climate activists from aggressive civil rights activism (e.g., Freedom Riders, MLK-led protests) or even early abolitionists given that they were all relatively unpopular and politically harmful positions in their day?
How can the planet Arrakis simultaneously be one of the single most important planets in the Imperium yet still function as a frontier colony with weak Imperial control?
Minor Houses have the appearance of status and authority on Arrakis; but when it comes to real tests of #StateCapacity, they are often constrained by the petty squabbles and localized knowledge of water-peddler merchants like Lingar Bewt, smugglers like Esmar Tuek, Guild bank representatives, and the Fremen.